Evensong (1999) by Gail Godwin

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Evensong (1999) 

by Gail Godwin

High Balsam, North Carolina

North Carolina: 18/20

  Another book about Church people in the mountains of Western North Carolina, only this time it's the classy sort.  Evensong is a good example of what you might call domestic/low stakes fiction with just enough professional engagement (the narrator is a female pastor of an Episcopalian congregation in the North Carolina mountains) to make it interesting.  I was never really worried about anything going on in this book, but every twenty pages or so the narrator/protagonist would make some kind of wry observations about the vagaries of married/professional life that I would chuckle.  Her Wikipedia says she has three National Book Award finalist nominations (1975, 1980 and 1983) but never got a win.  Seems about right?  Church people are boring people, by in large, that is something I've learned from books in the 1,001 Novels: A Libary of America.

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) by Alice Walker

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970)

by Alice Walker

Eaton, Georgia

Georgia: 1/26

   I started the next two chapters of 1,001 Novels: A Library of America at once.  Chapter 4 is Mountain Home & Hollows, Smokies & Ozarks and it contains Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.   The Third Life of Grange Copeland is the first book from Chapter 5: Blues & Bayous, Deltas & Coasts and it contains books from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida.   My sense is that Pennsylvania would have been a better fit in either the chapter with New York/New Jersey or the last chapter next to Viriginia, Maryland and DC but I haven't found a single interesting book yet in the Pennsylvania chapter and it is really slowing me down.

   Chapter 5, on the other hand, seems very promising, and more geographically aligned with the original sweep down the Atlantic coast that the first three Chapters seemed to promise.  I think I'll abandon Chapter 4 and do Chapter 5 first, then come back to 4.  

  Anyway, The Third Life of Grange Copeland was great- very dark but really good, and the first novel by Pultizer Prize winner Alice Walker.  The writing in Grange still seems fresh today- maybe more so today than it was back then.   Alice Walker is no stranger to the pages of this blog.  I read The Temple of My Familiar (1989) back in June of 2017- a book that was in and then out of the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die list.   Of course, The Color Purple is a drop-dead banger- also read that back in 2017 as part of the 1,001 Novels to Read Before You Die list.   I guess maybe Walker isn't considered to be as sophisticated as Toni Morrison, or maybe she is just a victim of The Color Purple's cultural success.  

 Unlike The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar is a historical novel served straight up with little deviation from a consistent timeline and narrative perspective.  What's amazing about Grange Copeland is that it almost seems like they are living in the 19th century all the way up until voting rights activists make an appearance.  Grange Copeland was also another example of Walker's theme of a deep and absolute hatred between black and white people, which I've noticed in her other books. 

Horse People (2013)by Cary Holladay

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

Horse People (2013)

by Cary Holladay 

Rapidan, Virginia

Virginia: 17/17

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   Finally closing out the Virginia sub-chapter of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project with Horse People, the impressively obscure novel-in-the-form-of-a-short-story-collection that I had to buy off Amazon because the Los Angeles Public Library system does not own a copy, and there is no Ebook, and there is no Audiobook.   Despite the title, the book isn't about "Horse People" in the sense that I understand that term which is "rich people who don't have to work and spend all their time and energy riding horses and talking about them."  Rather, the central figures seem to be a succession of what you might call the Viriginia version of poor white people, followed over generations, with the addition of a wealthier white woman who is more in line with what I expected from the use of that term. 

  I'd never heard of the author before- she's published nine books, all but one on a small or university press (this book was published by the University of Louisiana press, and her most lasting relationship is with the University of Ohio press) but it looks like she mostly works in the area of short stories. I didn't love the Viriginia chapter- Virginia didn't have the Kook factor of North Carolina and South Carolina, and I didn't relate to the locations like I did in Washington DC and Maryland.  Bye Virginia- doubt I will be back!